Oracle continues to enrich the capabilities of its Hyperion suite of applications that support the finance function, but I wonder if that will be enough to sustain its market share and new generation of expectations. At the recent Oracle OpenWorld these new features were on display, and spokespeople described how the company will be transitioning its software to cloud deployment. Our 2013 Financial Performance Management Value (FPM) Index rates Oracle Hyperion a Warm vendor in my analysis, ranking eighth out of nine vendors. Our Value Index is informed by more than a decade of analysis of technology suppliers and their products and how well they satisfy specific business and IT needs. We perform a detailed evaluation of product functionality and suitability-to-task as well as the effectiveness of vendor support for the buying process and customer assurance. Our assessment reflects two disparate sets of factors. On one hand, the Hyperion FPM suite offers a broad set of software that automates, streamlines and supports a range of finance department functions. It includes sophisticated analytical applications. Used to full effect, Hyperion can eliminate many manual steps and speed execution of routine work. It also can enhance accuracy, ensure tasks are completed on a timely basis, foster coordination between Finance and the rest of the organization and generate insights into corporate performance. For this, the software gets high marks.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Mobile,
Planning,
Social Media,
ERP,
Human Capital Management,
Modeling,
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
Budgeting,
close,
closing,
Consolidation,
Controller,
driver-based,
Finance Financial Applications Financial Close,
Hyperion,
IFRS,
Tax,
XBRL,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
CIO,
Cloud Computing,
In-memory,
Oracle,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
compliance,
Data,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
benchmark,
Financial Performance Management,
financial reporting,
FPM,
GAAP,
Integrated Business Planning,
Price Optimization,
Profitability,
SEC Software
Business planning as practiced today is a relic, a process hemmed in by obsolete conceptions of what it should be. I use the term “business planning” to encompass all of the forward-looking activities in which companies routinely engage, including, for example, sales, production and head-count planning as well as budgeting. Companies need to take a fresh view of all these, adopting a new approach to business planning that while preserving continuity makes a substantial departure from what most companies do now. Currently, in most organizations the budget is the only companywide business plan. However, while necessary for financial management and control, budgets are not especially useful for running an organization.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Planning,
Predictive Analytics,
Social Media,
Office of Finance,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Reporting,
Budgeting,
Controller,
In-memory,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Financial Performance Management,
financial reporting,
FPM,
Integrated Business Planning
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems emerged in the 1990s. Even though they don’t do much in the way of planning, the systems provide companies a means of centralizing and consolidating transaction data collection (such as purchase orders, inventory movements and depreciation), automating the management of processes, and handling the bookkeeping and financial record keeping for these transactions and related processes. ERP systems are an indispensable piece of IT infrastructure in today’s enterprises. Alas, they also are inherently flawed. But perhaps not for much longer.
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Topics:
Mobile,
SAP,
Social Media,
ERP,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Cloud Computing,
Oracle,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
Infor,
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Workday,
Social,
FPM,
Intacct
At this year’s Inforum user group conference, Infor representatives showed the progress the organization has made since last year in transforming itself from a ragbag of mostly small, often obsolete software companies to a competitive vendor of a modern enterprise management software suite. Infor was created by private equity investors employing a “rollup” strategy, aimed at combining smaller companies within an industry to form a single larger company that could achieve economies of scale and greater market presence. Others have tried this in the software industry in the past and encountered difficulty in making it work for two primary reasons. One is the technical challenge of achieving economies of scale in enterprise applications by turning a set of similar but separately developed software pieces into a single offering. Computer Associates achieved economies of scale through acquisition in the 1990s in the IT infrastructure software segment. But it did this largely by forcing customers of the various acquired companies to migrate to its single offering in the specific category. This is not a practical approach for business and finance enterprise applications because customers are willing to go off maintenance and eventually look for another vendor. The second difficulty is that newer or larger competitors can focus on innovation and overtake the rollup company while its attention and resources are focused on stitching the pieces together.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Mobile,
Planning,
Social Media,
GRC,
Office of Finance,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Budgeting,
closing,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Cloud Computing,
Collaboration,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
Customer Performance Management (CPM),
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Infor,
Information Management (IM),
IT Performance Management (ITPM),
Risk,
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
FPM,
SEC
Ventana Research does benchmark research that assesses the maturity of organizations across four dimensions: people, process, information and technology. We examine business issues along those dimensions because we recognize the interconnected relationships among them. Especially in larger companies, data issues such as accuracy and accessibility are often a root cause of poor performance of a core function. It may be a factor in such areas as poor customer service, sales execution or operations planning, to name just three. Addressing only the people-related issues of some challenge a company faces (such as communications, training or management style) may produce positive results in the short run, but these gains are likely to fall short of their potential or prove to be transitory unless companies tackle related process, technology and information problems at the same time. Our comprehensive approach is the foundation for our research, and what makes our benchmark research different and relevant to executives and managers.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Planning,
Social Media,
Office of Finance,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Reporting,
Budgeting,
driver-based,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
Customer Performance Management (CPM),
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
Financial Performance Management,
Integrated Business Planning
I recently started a series of blog posts on what CEOs (and for that matter, all senior corporate executives) need to know about IT. The first covered the high-level issues. As I noted there, it’s not necessary for a CEO of a company to be able to write Java code or master the intricacies of an ERP or sales compensation application. However, CEOs must grasp the basics of IT just as they must understand basic corporate finance, the production process and – at least at a high level – the technologies that support that process. This installment is about four supporting technologies that will be drive considerable change in business computing over the next five years. Each of these subjects is worthy of a chapter-length discussion or even a book; what follows is the “elevator pitch” version.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Mobile,
SaaS,
Social Media,
Customer,
ERP,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Cloud Computing,
Complex Event Processing,
In-memory,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
Customer Performance Management (CPM),
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Information Management (IM),
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
CEO,
PaaS
The idea of devising and using maturity assessments to improve business performance has been a staple of management, functional and strategic consultants for decades. It’s based on two unassailable principles. One is the general assertion that companies differ in their ability to do anything along a range from nonexistent to advanced. The second is that at any time it’s possible for a knowledgeable individual to construct a scale of competence for some business function from least to most mature based on the important characteristics about how an organization designs and executes that function. Using maturity scales is a handy way for executives and managers to size up where they lie on a continuum of capabilities and an easy way to define the steps necessary for improvement. Maturity assessments have the advantage of being straightforward, but there’s the danger that they can be overly simplistic.
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Topics:
Performance Management,
Social Media,
Customer Experience,
Governance,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Cloud Computing,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Operational Intelligence,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
Customer Performance Management (CPM),
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Information Applications (IA),
Information Management (IM),
IT Performance Management (ITPM),
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
benchmark,
FPM
I cover the meat-and-potatoes aspects of corporate computing. I also pay attention to the special needs of midsize companies (by our definition, those with between 100 and 999 employees), which are unlike those of either small business or large corporations. After attending this year’s Dreamforce conference, Salesforce.com’s annual user meeting held this week in San Francisco, I can appreciate how difficult it is for executives and people who work in back office functions to cut through the technology hoopla to find the utterly practical (but certainly not dull) reasons why the cloud can help them run their businesses better. In fact, cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings can give midsize companies a leg up in ways that on-premises alternatives can’t. Here are four big ones that top my list.
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Topics:
Sales,
Salesforce.com,
Social Media,
ERP,
Office of Finance,
CRM customer service,
SMB,
Cloud Computing,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
Customer Performance Management (CPM),
Dreamforce,
finance,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Security,
FPM
Anyone who focuses on the practical uses of information technology, as I do, must consider the data aspects of adopting any new technology to achieve some business purpose. Reliable data must be readily available in the necessary form and format, or that shiny new IT bauble you want to deploy will fall short of expectations. Our research benchmarks cover a range of core business and IT processes, and they regularly demonstrate that data deficiencies are a root cause of issues organizations have in performing core functions; typically the larger the company, the more severe the data issues become.
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Topics:
Social Media,
GRC,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
IBM Business Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
CIO,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Operational Intelligence,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
Customer Performance Management (CPM),
finance,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Information Applications (IA),
Information Management (IM),
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM)
